On Eccentricity

Why I want to be a 'character.'

When I was a child growing up on the edge of a rural Canadian lake, there was a strange old man who lived at the far end. His name was Phil, and most of his teeth were missing. He had long straggly grey hair that hung out from under a tattered cap. He lived in an uninsulated A-frame shack during the summer and rode a three-wheeled ATV that rumbled as it came down the dirt road, giving me and my sister enough time to dive into the bushes to avoid coming face-to-face with him. He liked to paddle his canoe at dusk, and he once told my dad that he loved nothing more than raking leaves by the light of a full moon, an anecdote that permanently seared itself into my brain.

Janet was an elderly Ukrainian woman who lived at the opposite end of the lake. There were two cottages on her property, one for her and one for her husband, who my mother told me was “nocturnal.” That’s why they needed separate houses. Janet was mostly blind when I met her, but her cottage was full of magnificent portraits that she had painted when she was young; she had studied art in Italy. She also loved classical chamber music, which she played on an old record player.

Further down the road was Peter, who lived in another shack, this one covered in tar paper. He slept on a plywood board covered with a sleeping bag. Whenever he needed groceries, he hitchhiked into town. Peter made linocut prints and oil paintings. He liked to sing opera and would serenade us whenever he came for dinner. I complained to my mother that he smelled, but she told me to get over it.

Live and Let Live

Before you conclude that I grew up in a region rife with wackos, I’d like to suggest an alternative hypothesis—that I grew up in a time (the ‘90s, not so long ago) when people were more likely to be eccentric. Phil, Janet, and Peter are examples of quirky misfits, nonconformist bohemians who were utterly unconcerned with what other people thought about how they lived. They simply did their own thing. They were, as my parents often said, “real characters.”

I wonder if it was easier to be a “character” in a pre-digital era. Before the Internet, the only way to catch a glimpse of other people’s homes and lives was by entering them, personally, physically. Some information about how others lived could be gleaned from books, magazines, movies, radio and TV shows, but there was always a sense that what we saw might be performative or unattainable, belonging, for example, to the realm of rich celebrities. When it came to one’s own neighbours and everyday life, there seemed to be more an attitude of “live and let live,” a general acceptance that unique personalities would lead to unique lifestyles. People’s lives were, for the most part, intensely private.

Then, along came the Internet, followed by social media platforms, which made it disturbingly easy to see how other people did things. That opened a can of worms because, once it became possible to see what others do, it became irresistible not to. After all, we humans are irrepressibly curious and voyeuristic. We are also instinctive copycats, always looking to pattern our behaviours after those who we perceive to be successful. And success came to be defined by social popularity, quantified by number of views, likes, comments, shares. Social media gave us an alluring visual template for how we think we ought to be living in order to be popular or, at the very least, “normal.”

Instead of asking, “How do I want to live?”, many of us started asking, “What’s everyone else doing?” and taking that as our cue for where to allocate effort and channel interest. In some ways, this makes life easier. We don’t have to think for ourselves. All we need to do is scroll through Instagram or TikTok to figure out what outfit everyone’s wearing, what colour they’re painting their nails or their bedroom this season, which viral recipe is ripping through every kitchen (and the trendy specialized appliance it requires), what vacation destination is most popular, which website everyone is buying their mass-produced “art” from so that we can have it in our home, too.

All Alike

In this process, however, we end up succumbing to a troubling process of homogenization, which I do believe happens inadvertently, for the most part. We don’t set out planning to look and act like everyone else, but the inevitable outcome of exposing ourselves to the intimate details of others’ lives can’t help but influence us. It’s how advertising works; when faced with a choice, we will be more inclined to select the product/look/demeanour that is familiar than the one that is foreign.

Over time, we become so much like each other that we risk losing sight of ourselves. I think about this every time I see women who all do the exact same Botox injections and lip fillers. “What’s wrong with looking like yourself?” I wonder. Why blur your own features in an endless pursuit of hypersexualized “beauty” that’s been fed to you by an algorithm?

We risk becoming boring pancake people who outsource the chewy meat of life’s choices to digital “experts”, even though they can’t possibly know what we like and dislike because they do not know us and never will! We relinquish opportunities to express ourselves out of a fear that we won’t fit in. We fear and avoid eccentricity like a plague.

From Wide to Narrow

There is another aspect to this that I’ve been thinking about, too, and that’s the way in which digital devices have displaced time and space to develop hobbies. Creative pursuits must be born out of boredom, but boredom doesn’t really exist anymore. There is always a rabbit hole to go down, which makes it nearly impossible to turn an interminable stretch of empty time into something productive and satisfying.

In his new book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, Nicholas Carr explains that all mammals are seekers. The urge to explore our surroundings is a crucial aspect of our survival. But once we become familiar with those surroundings, whether a physical environment or a group of people, that exploratory instinct subsides. Novelty wears off, the mind calms, we gain focus. Then, and only then:

We begin to explore narrowly rather than widely, deeply rather than superficially… We begin to discover the rewards of looking long and hard at the world we know. The possibilities of art, science, and philosophy open up. The story of civilization is, among other stories, a story of the taming of the seeking instinct.

The Internet, a stimulation machine without parallel, upsets the equilibrium. It gives us an environment with no limits on exploration. The new and novel flood in from all sides. Freed from our material surroundings, liberated from the constraints of space and time, we no longer feel a need or even have an opportunity to go beyond the flux of the now.

What happens to us as humans, to our minds and our souls, when we never go beyond passive consumption to active creation? When all we do is sit back and watch what other people are doing, instead of showing up to our own lives with curiosity and initiative and determination? When we never contribute anything or learn any new skills or feel a spark of interest that something that grows into a full-blown, albeit temporary, obsession (like me with knitting)?

Do Your Own Things

Back to those characters who added such colour to my childhood, I think about how they filled their days. Because they did not have smartphones or an Internet connection at their disposal, they were forced to develop interesting habits and hobbies to pass the many empty hours of their lives. Whether it was portrait-painting, leaf-raking, canoeing, or opera-singing, they had to fill that time somehow. The result was activity, movement, skill, satisfaction, possibly even joy, not least of all because they weren’t constantly comparing themselves to someone else’s version of what’s “cool” to do. They simply lived.

Nowadays, I mourn the loss of widespread eccentricity (I realize it does continue to exist in some places, among people who are less inclined to proclaim it online). And I realize that I want to be a character; I urge you to be one, too, because it means that you’re dancing to the beat of your own drum, not that of an algorithm. I want to be someone with hobbies that others will remember, whose unabashed personal taste stands out, who refuses to be like everyone else, not least of all because that’s boring! I want to be someone who’s known for living their life fully and deeply offline. And if that means being seen as an eccentric, then so be it.

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